Dead Piero Gilardi, artist of nature (with polyurethane) – Corriere.it

About his Rugs-Nature, those reconstructions in polyurethane foam of portions of the natural environment (meadows, undergrowth, riverbeds) that would have made him famous, Piero Gilardi (died at the age of 80) in 1966 he wrote: I hope to be able to bring together, one day, all the carpets I am making in a large and flat place, enclosed by a shapeless and opalescent dome: in that rarefied environment the image of each carpet will begin to dilate and deform according to an incomprehensible but acceptable organic rhythm. One way to confirm how the mission of those Carpets (the first date back to 1965): to involve the viewer through the tactile and bodily experience, they place the accent on one of the paradoxes of the modern age by denouncing the commodification (and degradation) of nature and a lifestyle deemed increasingly artificial.

Those Carpets embodied Gilardi’s ethical, ecological and political commitment. They were a way to make his dream come true: the dream of an ideal, uncontaminated nature, recreated through an artificial material such as expanded polyurethane, which takes shape through the carving technique and then is impregnated with synthetic pigment, in the first experiments dissolved in vinyl resin and later in rubber latex. At the time, the artist’s intention was to create real aesthetic objects that could be practically used and overcome the dualism between art and technology, between nature and artifice, between the body and the world, soft carpets it was possible to walk, lie down, live a multisensory experience.

Born in Turin on 3 August 1942, Piero Gilardi began his artistic career in the 1960s in the cultural climate of Post-Pop Art making itself known to the general publicor thanks to its Nature-Rugs. Son of the painter and model Cecilia Lavelli, he made his debut in 1963 with a neo-Dadaist exhibition of Machines for the future at the Galleria L’Immagine in Turin, participating in the birth of Arte Povera and Land Art. In the highly politicized climate of the late 1960s, Gilardi decided to interrupt his own artistic production (Domestic Totem1964; Dress-Nature and Stones1967) looking for new life experiences in the peripheral areas of the planet, participating in the theoretical elaboration of new artistic trends: Land Art, Antiform Art, Microemotional Art.

By supporting his own artistic activity with political militancy in formations of the so-called new left (extra-parliamentary left or extreme left), embracing the artistic movements of collective and spontaneous creativity, living creative experiences not only in Italy, but also in Nicaragua, in various African countries and in the Native American territories in the United States.

Gilardi return to full artistic production from 1981, telling his own story artistic-ideological path in a titled text From art to life, from life to artpublished in 1981. To follow in 2000 Not for sale for Mazzotta publisher. His return to art coincides with an interactive and multimedia research aimed at the full and dynamic involvement of the public in the installations he created (Pulsation, Absolut, Shared emotions).

Since 2002 Gilardi has been involved in the creation of the PAV (Living Art Park) in Turin, opened in 2006, an experimental center of contemporary art integrated into nature. Among the numerous personal those at the Municipal Art Gallery, Loggetta Lombardesca, in Ravenna (1999), at the Civic Gallery of Modena (2006), at the Castello di Rivoli (2012), at the PAV in Turin (2013), at the MAXXI in Rome (2017) and at the Michel Rein of Paris (2020). In May 2022, the Magazzino Italian Art of Cold Spring, in the state of New York has opened to the public an exhibition dedicated to Gilardi and the Nature-Rugs. The exhibition, the first in the United States that a museum has dedicated to the Italian artist, presents a wide selection of important works with prestigious loans from European and American public and private institutions. Curated by Elena Re — art critic and independent curator specialized in Italian art — Gilardi: Carpet-Nature took shape from the generous donation made by Gilardi to Magazzino to tell and shed light on the experience of a pioneer who, in the middle of the Sixties, had started a dialogue between Italy and the United States and who is still constantly committed to the formation of a international artistic community, which embodies the link between art and life.